Many thought the monkey with the funny name was gone for good, the first primate to plunge into extinction in 200 years.

There has not been a recorded sighting of Miss Waldron s red colobus since the 1970s. Ohio State University researcher W. Scott McGraw has looked for the monkey for nearly a decade.

But now, Dr. McGraw says, there is evidence that at least a few of these handsome red-and-black monkeys are swinging through the treetops.

The only primate to vanish in the 20th century is not really extinct at all.

Just nearly so.

“We wrote a paper in 2000 that said, we think we looked everywhere. This animal is probably extinct,” Dr. McGraw said.

Then the clues began drifting in.

He returned to Africa to search a forest he had skipped earlier, one rumored to be teeming with the elusive Miss Waldron s colobus. This forest was always considered a poor prospect for the monkey. Although it was an old-growth forest, which the monkeys require, it was not a preserve.

“It s completely unprotected. Most unprotected forests are hunted out,” Dr. McGraw said.

The forest straddles Ivory Coast and Ghana, two nations where miles of trees have been reduced to matchsticks and scrub due to aggressive logging. Only 8 percent of West Africa s forests remain, but many of those are silent, nearly every animal slaughtered for the commercial trade in wild animals.

Yet nature itself had saved this scrap of ecosystem. It is mired in swamp. Only now are hunters wading its waist-high waters to pick off the wildlife.

On Dr. McGraw s first trip to this forest, a hunter gave him a tail from a monkey he had killed. It looked like a Miss Waldron s monkey tail, and DNA analysis confirmed it was a colobus.

He searched again in 2002. In a hunting camp, he found a skin of a Miss Waldron s, a monkey named for the traveling companion of the British explorer who named the species, a woman known only as F. Waldron.

A few months after returning to Ohio, Dr. McGraw received a letter from an African friend. Enclosed was a photograph of the man with a dead monkey.

“The monkey was a red colobus. And I knew the photograph was recent. The question is, is it a Miss Waldron s?”

There are two other black-and-red colobus species in West Africa.

Unfortunately, the monkey in the photograph was facing the wrong way for a definitive identification.

“Now I ve got a tail, a skin, and a picture.... The Catch-22 is, all the evidence is of dead monkeys.”

Still, “the signs are encouraging. There still may be some in this forest. The question is, are there enough? Can we conserve them? Would they recover? I have my doubts.”

Thomas Struhsaker, an authority on colobus monkeys, holds little hope. Dr. Struhsaker was a co-author with Dr. Scott of the research paper on the monkey s probable extinction.

“What are there, 100 left, 200 left? Or even 1,000? I still think you ve got a basket case, he said. And it s more than just one monkey at stake. It represents an entire ecosystem torn apart, countless plant and animal species disappearing, the Duke University professor said.

John Oates, another co-author of the extinction paper, said, “Whatever remains there, if some red colobus still survive, it s not very promising.”

First Published February 5, 2004, 12:43 p.m.